The worldwide network of computers commonly referred to as the “Internet” has seen explosive growth in the last several years. Correspondingly, private networks that utilize the Internet protocol have also seen explosive growth. These private networks include, for example, intranets, i.e., networks used internally in an organization, and extranets, i.e., networks that securely share part of an organization's information or operations with suppliers, vendors, partners, customers, or other businesses.
These computer networks continue to evolve as new forms of technology are applied to the basic Internet infrastructure which consists of many elements, not the least of which are the Web browser and websites accessed utilizing the Web browser. A website is a collection of webpages, i.e., documents accessible via the computer network. The webpages are generally accessed from a common root destination address, typically a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), and can reside on the same physical server, or multiple servers. The URLs of the webpages are organized in a hierarchy, although the hyperlinks between them control how the user perceives the overall structure of the website.
The number of webpages that form a website, and the associated amount of information that may be available through such a website, continues to increase. Moreover, specific presentation methods vary widely from website to website without any consistency, and thus, leave users uncertain as to what types of information the websites generally maintain. Even when a user knows in advance that a website contains certain types of information, the website may not present to the user a guide as to how to directly access that information from a given webpage in the website. Consequently, the user may be required to manually search through the individual pages of a website.
Searching through a website, however, can be time consuming, and the downloading process can take a significant amount of time, especially when a user has to bring up several webpages to reach a desired webpage. Moreover, if the website contains a large amount of information not relevant to a particular user's interest, it may be difficult for the user to locate the information he or she requires. If it is too difficult or takes too much time to locate the desired information, a frustrated user may switch to a different website or simply log off.
Accordingly, developers of complex websites face the critical problem of how to facilitate navigation through the myriad of information available in a complex, multiple webpage, website. In particular, it is highly desirable to enable users of the website to rapidly locate relevant webpages within a website.
Attempts have been made to facilitate website navigation by employing search facilities within the website. While the use of a search engine within a website is an improvement over manually searching and downloading multiple webpages, the use of a search engine can be problematic if the user is unable to articulate the appropriate keywords for entry into the search engine. Moreover, a search engine leads a user to webpages without showing them their context within the rest of the website. If a user finds a webpage through a search, finding it again means having to remember exactly what search query they entered the first time. Such an activity is not an easy thing to do.
Thus, what is needed is a technique for facilitating navigation in a website, the technique being readily implemented within a website and readily adaptable to the changing profile of a website.